March 10-16, 2005

movies

Ground Level

winter for hitler: Bruno Ganz as Downfall's beleagured Adolf.

Downfall buries the truth; Turtles Can Fly soars.

by Sam Adams

No weak men in the books at home The strong men who have made the world History lives on the books at home The books at home It's not made by great men "Not Great Men," Gang of Four

Five young women sit nervously outside the door waiting for their chance to meet him. Their dress is demure but not unrevealing, designed at once to display respect and attract attention. The air is close and electric. At the sound of movement, the women's necks crane forward as one, and then suddenly, there he is. Adolf Hitler is ready for his close-up.

As played by Bruno Ganz in Downfall, Hitler is a nervous, twitchy sort, hardly worthy of the adulation that the German people have bestowed on him. True, we're not seeing him at his best: After that stage-setting opening, Oliver Hirschbiegel's movie, scripted by Bernd Eichinger from firsthand accounts, jumps two and a half years and lands squarely in the last days of the Third Reich, when Hitler and his ever-dwindling staff are confined to the underground headquarters known as the führerbunker. Hirschbiegel's portentous docudrama casts itself as a reckoning, an unflinching look at Germany's pitch-black past. But there's something convenient and ultimately inadequate about the fact that Downfall only shows Hitler at the end of his rope, the first two fingers of his right hand forming spasmodic circles as if he's about to collapse.

This is not the Hitler who enthralled a nation, but one who has betrayed it. As he clings to the futile hope that the tattered remnants of the German army will be able to stave off the swelling Soviet attack, advisor after advisor warns him that his plans are doomed and that his resistance to surrender, to say nothing of his plans to decimate German infrastructure rather than allow the Russians to claim it, will result in the unnecessary deaths of innumerable civilians. "It isn't necessary to consider the German people's primitive survival instincts," he sneers to Albert Speer (Heino Ferch).

Criticisms notwithstanding, Downfall is as seduced by Hitler's star power as any obedient Nazi. The ensemble structure leaves room to depict "good Nazis" like Speer and Dr. Ernst-Günther Schneck (Christian Berkel), who refuses to evacuate Berlin as long as there are civilians to be fed. But they don't make the impression Magda Goebbels (Corinna Harfouch) does as she poisons her children with cyanide rather than allow them to live in "a world without National Socialism." Striding toward them with venomous dignity, she takes on a tragic stature Hirschbiegel doesn't have the sense or the skill to undermine, inadvertently revealing the lasting allure of totalitarianism.

Downfall takes a few steps away from its magnetic central characters, mainly by framing the story through the eyes of Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), the eager candidate who emerges from the opening scene's ranks to become one of Hitler's personal secretaries. In a passage from Junge's memoirs, she recalls "not knowing what I was getting into. É Curiosity got the better of me," a statement whose baffling inadequacy is familiar from the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, filmed before Junge's death in 2002. The Junge of Blind Spot is a maddening character whose relentless profession of ignorance eventually gives way to the admission that not knowing is no excuse, a prescription for national accountability Downfall attempts to echo by closing with an excerpt from Blind Spot. But Downfall's you-are-there approach makes perspective impossible. There's one scene where a World War I veteran tries to dissuade a group of baby-faced Nazis from joining the conflict, which might serve as a warning to young Germans that the past — and particularly the threat of a neo-Nazi resurgence — is not as remote as they might think. But despite the occasional veiled warning, Downfall is resolutely stuck in the past tense. No matter how much she learned about the Nazi regime, the real Junge finally says, "I wasn't able to see the connection to my own past." Downfall keeps the blinders on.

The far more recent past plays backdrop to Turtles Can Fly, set in the three days preceding the American invasion of Iraq. In a tiny village on the Iraq side of the Turkish border, the great men who so preoccupy Downfall are only a distant presence: Bush makes a cameo as a flickering television image, while the severed arm of a statue of Saddam turns up after the invasion. "In my film, the supporting casts are Bush and Saddam," Bahman Ghobadi writes in his director's statement. "The Iraqi people and the street children play the leading parts."

Turtles' hero, such as he is, is Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), a streetwise, tough-talking child with a gift for negotiating between the factions gathered in the country's northern regions. He pays the refugee children who swarm around him pittance to collect mines (preferably American-made), then trades the mines for automatic weapons, using the handful of English phrases he knows to impress others with his worldliness. "There's money in 'hello' these days," he says, using the English word. "If you don't say hello, nobody answers back."

Satellite's scattered command of English comes from his most valued skill: procuring the satellite dishes that are the villagers' main link to the outside world. "The world is at war. Everybody's after news," says a village elder as he urges Satellite to find them a dish, a hunger attested to by the opening images of antennas raised jutting from a ridge, their cables slicing through the sky.

When the dish does come, an old model decorated with crowns along its rim, the images it brings seem almost otherworldly and a cutting contrast with the Kurds' cruel reality: Bush's smug certainty, a CNN commentator blithely rattling off the mantra "Invade, occupy, rebuild," a blond Cobain look-alike moaning "Miseryyyyy." Turtles counters with images of the Kurds' daily horror: an armless boy collecting mines with his teeth; a lost child wailing into a stack of empty artillery casings, his voice echoing until it becomes a surreal refrain.

Initially identified as "the girl from Halabcheh," the site of a notorious Iraqi chemical attack, the armless boy's sister, Agrin (Avaz Latif) is introduced as the object of Satellite's affections, but their stories rarely intersect. It's she who is seen in the movie's first moments, contemplating throwing herself off a cliff — understandable once we find out that Iraqi troops killed her family and raped her. Since Middle Eastern films, not least those by Ghobadi's mentor Abbas Kiarostami, are often conceived in symbolic terms, it's easy to see Agrin as a representation of the Kurds' sorrowful past and Satellite as their attempt to forge a viable future. If so, the movie's outlook is bleak, though not entirely without hope.

In the course of three features (not to mention several short documentaries), Ghobadi has established his command of a unique vision which is at once politically urgent and hauntingly poetic. In the scene of Agrin's violation, which is as much a dream as a flashback, she wears a red sequined dress, which is either a fool's touch or a master's. Turtles Can Fly leaves no doubt as to which.

Downfall Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel A Newmarket Films release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse Turtles Can Fly Written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi An IFC Films release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended